When I have launched this blog I did it with intention of spread Brazilian culture and culture produced by other countries around world. And then I wanna say thank you for the people from 120 countries who visit us. Thank you! Thanks to Washington Post, NYTimes, Amazon, USAToday, Paris Review, LRB, GoodReads, Time, Vogue, Esquire, Harpers, Simon and Schuster, Latimes, NPR, London Review and other sources by permission... You are the responsible by these dreams. Thank you for All!

When Americans imagine Tokyo circa 1947, they
picture Gen. Douglas MacArthur in khaki, G.I.s tossing chocolate from jeeps, an
emperor reduced from archfiend to bureaucrat. In his 1999 masterpiece,
“Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II,” the historian John W.
Dower shifted the focus to the Japanese, liberated, exhausted and bewildered.
Now Lynne Kutsukake, a third-generation ­Japanese-Canadian and first-time
novelist, conjures the voices of this agonized time with graceful simplicity.

First there is Fumi, 12 years old and in search
of her big sister, Sumiko, who went to work when the family bookshop was
firebombed — work that required her to wear wobbly heels and slit skirts, and
kept her in the Ginza entertainment district more and more, until she stopped
coming home at all. At school, Fumi is annoyed when the teacher saddles her
with a new “repat girl,” Aya Shimamura, a Vancouver native now forcibly
returned to a “homeland” she has never seen. But perhaps Aya isn’t such a
liability. “The government is interested in hearing from the people,” the
Americans announced when they arrived, and a “little Mount Fuji” of mail has
been growing at occupation headquarters: opinions, complaints, entreaties. Fumi
decides that a letter to MacArthur is her best hope of finding her sister. And
Aya, who is hopeless at everything but English, can write it.

Rounding out the cast are Cpl. ­Yoshitaka
(Matt) Matsumoto, a ­button-down translator with the occupation, born in
America to Japanese immigrant parents, and Kondo-sensei, Fumi’s teacher, who
moonlights as a bilingual Cyrano-for-hire, writing desperate “Dear Charlie”
appeals on behalf of Japanese women clinging to the flimsy promises of departed
G.I.s. The two men are the double conscience of the novel, two sides of an
imperfect linguistic mirror.

The narrative perspective shifts constantly
among these five, their actions and reactions sketched with minimal fuss. The
story is satisfying but secondary to the mood: the quiet ache of loss. There
are no landmarks in flattened Tokyo, and few indicators of what comes next. On
the occupation-issued map hanging in Kondo-sensei’s classroom, Japan is now a “shriveled
bean” at the very edge.

Everyone is betwixt: suspended between the pain
of the past and the uncertainty of the future, and caught between identities as
well. Back home in America, Matt was interned as a foreign threat; now he’s
among the ranks of the victors in American uniform, growing used to the
shuttered glances he encounters in the street. Which side is he really on? For
Aya, it’s worse: There is no “back home.” “No Japs from the Rockies to the
seas,” Vancouver’s member of Parliament famously trumpeted in 1944, and Aya’s
father chose not to remain in a land where “they will always hate us.” Sumiko,
flirting with danger in a dance hall, was raised to be “proper” — so then what
to make of the persistent part of her that thrills to escape the conventional
Japanese confines of good wife and wise mother?

The plainness of Kutsukake’s prose can verge on
threadbare, with patches of earnest research peeking through, but these lapses
are balanced by moments of indelible poignancy. A battered storefront advertises
“DEMOCRACY POTS AND PANS.” The cheap red paint on the wall of a dance hall is
like a woman’s lipstick, “faded and cracked by the end of the night.” A summer
kimono printed with blue-and-white bamboo swaddles a discarded half-­Japanese
infant’s corpse.

In the background, like a chorus, are the
letters constantly arriving at headquarters. “Dear General MacArthur,” writes
an octogenarian survivor. “How should a man live?” Kutsukake’s aim is not to
answer this, but to keep asking.

Janice
P. Nimura is the author of “Daughters of the Samurai: A Journey From East to
West and Back.”

A fly by imagination

And life passes so quickly...

Because literature is part of our history.

The main idea of this Blog is spread the habit of reading. Literature is part of our lives. When enter in the Literature world, we read better and we improve our though and imagination.I want, with this, divide a little of my dreams. Is to give opportunity to people read and know about works produced by ancient and contemporary writers, and mainly, myself to be insert in this wonderful world of the Letters.